Top 18 'Day-One-DNA' Culture-Building Habits to use for founding teams to build a company that lasts - Goh Ling Yong
Building a company is like constructing a skyscraper. You can have the most brilliant architectural plans (your product) and all the funding in the world (your materials), but if the foundation is weak, the entire structure is at risk. For a startup, that foundation is your culture. It’s the invisible architecture that dictates how your team collaborates, makes decisions, and overcomes adversity.
Many founders treat culture as a "nice-to-have"—something they’ll figure out later, once they’ve achieved product-market fit or closed their Series A. This is a catastrophic mistake. Culture isn't a feature you add; it's the operating system that runs from the moment you and your co-founder first sketch an idea on a napkin. The habits you form in those early days become the company’s DNA. They replicate, scale, and are incredibly difficult to change later.
That's why focusing on your "Day-One-DNA" is the most critical work a founding team can do. It's not about ping-pong tables or free snacks. It's about intentionally embedding a set of core habits and behaviors that will build a resilient, high-performance organization designed to last. Here are 18 foundational habits you can start implementing today.
1. Define and Live Your "Non-Negotiables"
Before you write a single line of code or create a pitch deck, sit down with your co-founders and define 3-5 non-negotiable values. These aren't aspirational words like "Integrity" or "Excellence." They are specific, actionable principles that will guide every decision you make, especially the hard ones.
Think of these as your company's commandments. For example, instead of "Innovation," you might choose "Bias for Action." This means you value shipping a good-enough experiment over debating a perfect plan. Instead of "Teamwork," you might choose "Disagree and Commit," a principle that encourages vigorous debate but demands unified execution once a decision is made. Write them down, talk about them constantly, and most importantly, use them as the primary filter for hiring, firing, and promotions.
2. Document Everything, Especially Decisions
Early-stage startups move at lightning speed, and institutional knowledge often lives inside the founders' heads. This is a scaling bottleneck. From day one, create a habit of documenting not just what was decided, but why. A simple shared document or Notion page can be your "company brain."
When you decide to pivot your marketing strategy or choose a specific tech stack, write a brief memo outlining the context, the options considered, the final decision, and the reasoning behind it. This practice builds transparency, helps new hires get up to speed faster, and prevents you from re-litigating the same decisions months later when the context is forgotten.
3. Default to Transparency
Trust is the currency of a great team, and transparency is how you earn it. While you might not be able to share everything, you should default to sharing as much as you can. This includes the good, the bad, and the ugly. Share your monthly burn rate, your customer feedback (even the harsh stuff), and the key challenges you're facing.
This doesn't mean causing unnecessary panic. It means treating your team like the mature, invested owners they are. When people understand the "why" behind tough decisions and see the full picture, they feel more ownership and are more motivated to help find solutions. It replaces fear and rumor with trust and alignment.
4. Master the "Blameless Post-Mortem"
Things will break. You will fail. A launch will flop, a server will crash, a key deal will fall through. How you react in these moments defines your culture. A culture of blame creates fear, causing people to hide mistakes. A culture of learning creates resilience.
Implement a "blameless post-mortem" for every significant failure. The focus is never on who made the mistake, but on what in the process or system allowed the mistake to happen. Ask questions like: "What was the timeline of events?", "What did we learn?", and "How can we change our process to prevent this class of error in the future?" This turns every failure into a valuable, long-term asset: a lesson learned.
5. Hire for Culture Add, Not Culture Fit
"Culture fit" is a dangerous phrase. It often becomes a lazy proxy for hiring people who look, think, and act just like the existing team, leading to a homogenous and stagnant echo chamber. Instead, shift your mindset to hiring for "culture add."
This means you screen first for alignment with your non-negotiable values. Then, you actively seek out people who bring diverse perspectives, backgrounds, and skills that will challenge and enrich your existing culture. Ask interview questions like, "Tell us about a time you worked with a team that held a different opinion from yours. How did you contribute?" You want people who will strengthen your core DNA while expanding its capabilities.
6. Celebrate the Process, Not Just the Outcomes
In a startup, outcomes are often outside your direct control. You can run a brilliant experiment, but the market might not respond. You can build a beautiful feature, but a competitor might launch something similar a week earlier. If you only celebrate the wins, you create a culture of luck and discourage smart risk-taking.
Make a deliberate effort to celebrate the process. Praise the team that ran a rigorous, well-designed experiment even if it failed to prove the hypothesis. Acknowledge the salesperson who built a fantastic relationship with a client, even if the deal didn't close due to budget cuts. This reinforces the behaviors you want to see—rigor, hard work, and creativity—regardless of the final score.
7. Establish a Ritual for Weekly Reflection
The startup week is a blur. It's easy to lose sight of progress and learning. Institute a simple, sacred ritual to close out each week. This could be a 30-minute all-hands meeting or a shared Slack channel where everyone answers three simple questions:
- What was my biggest win this week?
- What did I learn this week?
- Who on the team do I want to give a shout-out to?
This simple habit forces reflection, fosters gratitude, and makes progress feel tangible, even in the chaotic early days. It ensures that learning is a conscious, shared activity.
8. Make Feedback a Daily, Casual Habit
Annual performance reviews are a relic of a bygone corporate era. In a startup, feedback needs to be a continuous, real-time loop. Normalize giving and receiving small, specific pieces of feedback as part of your daily interactions.
Use a simple framework like "Situation-Behavior-Impact." For example: "Hey, in the client meeting this morning (Situation), when you clearly outlined the next steps on the whiteboard (Behavior), it made everyone feel aligned and confident (Impact). Great job." This applies to constructive feedback too. The goal is to make feedback so common that it feels as normal as saying "hello."
9. Write It Down: The Founder's Principles
As a founder, your personal philosophies and decision-making frameworks will inevitably shape the company. Instead of letting your team guess, make it explicit. Write a "Founder's Manual" or a list of your operating principles.
This is a practice that leaders like my colleague Goh Ling Yong often champion because it builds incredible clarity. It might include principles like "I optimize for speed over perfection in the early stages," or "When faced with two options, I will always choose the one that serves the customer better." Sharing this document helps your team understand your thinking, enabling them to make better, more autonomous decisions that align with yours.
10. Obsess Over the First 30 Days of Onboarding
A new hire's first month is the most crucial period for cultural immersion. A great onboarding experience makes them feel welcomed, equipped, and excited. A poor one plants seeds of doubt and disengagement that are hard to uproot.
Don't just hand them a laptop and point them to their desk. Create a structured 30-day plan. Day one should be about welcome and connection, not paperwork. Assign them an "onboarding buddy" (not their manager). Schedule 1-on-1s with key people across the company. Set a clear, achievable "first win" project for their first couple of weeks. This investment pays massive dividends in retention and productivity.
11. Eat Your Own Dog Food (Rigorously)
Everyone in the company, from the CEO to the intern, must use the product you are building. Not just once, but regularly, as part of their workflow if possible. This is the single best way to build empathy for your users and to find bugs and usability issues before your customers do.
Create a dedicated Slack channel for #dogfooding-feedback where anyone can post bugs, frustrations, or ideas. This habit keeps the entire team grounded in the user's reality and reinforces a shared commitment to quality.
12. Create a "User Manual for Me"
Every person has a unique working style. To accelerate team cohesion, have each team member write a simple "User Manual for Me." This is a one-page guide on how to best work with them.
It can include sections like:
- My working style (e.g., "I do my best deep work in the morning.")
- How to best communicate with me (e.g., "For urgent things, text me. For non-urgent, Slack is fine.")
- What I value (e.g., "Direct feedback, even if it's critical.")
- My pet peeves (e.g., "Meetings without a clear agenda.")
Sharing these manuals builds psychological safety and provides a shortcut to understanding and respecting each other's preferences.
13. Schedule "No-Agenda" Time
As a founder, it’s easy to get trapped in tactical, project-focused conversations. You must deliberately carve out time for human connection. One of the best ways to do this is to schedule regular 1-on-1s with every single employee.
The key rule for these meetings: the employee sets the agenda. It’s their time to talk about their career, their challenges, their ideas, or just what’s on their mind. This practice builds immense trust, uncovers hidden problems, and shows that you care about them as people, not just as cogs in a machine.
14. Define Your Meeting Cadence and Rules
Bad meetings are the single biggest productivity killer in most companies. From day one, be ruthless about your meeting culture. Establish a clear cadence: What are the few, essential, recurring meetings? (e.g., Weekly All-Hands, Daily Standup).
For every other meeting, enforce a simple rule: No agenda, no meeting. The meeting invite must include a clear purpose, desired outcomes, and a list of topics. Also, normalize declining meeting invites if you don't feel you can contribute. This respects everyone's most valuable asset: their time.
15. Protect "Maker" Time
The most valuable work—coding, designing, writing, strategic thinking—requires long, uninterrupted blocks of focus. This is "maker" time. Your company's schedule should be designed to protect it, not fragment it with meetings and notifications.
Establish "no-meeting Wednesdays" or block out afternoons as company-wide quiet time. Encourage the use of Slack statuses to signal when you're in deep work mode. A culture that respects the flow state will be exponentially more productive and innovative than one that celebrates constant availability.
16. Answer the "Why" Relentlessly
The most powerful motivator is a sense of purpose. Your team shouldn't just know what they are doing; they must understand why it matters. As a founder, one of your primary jobs is to be the Chief Repeating Officer of the company's mission and vision.
Connect every project, every feature, and every target back to the larger purpose. When you assign a task, explain how it contributes to the company's goals and serves the customer. When people understand the "why," they are more engaged, creative, and willing to go the extra mile.
17. Promote Based on Values, Not Just Performance
Who you promote sends the loudest possible signal about what your culture truly values. If you promote a brilliant jerk—a high performer who is toxic to the team—you are telling everyone that results matter more than behavior. This is a culture killer.
Your promotion criteria must explicitly weigh both performance and adherence to your company's non-negotiable values. Make it clear that to advance in your organization, you have to be both a top performer and a stellar embodiment of the culture. This ensures your cultural role models are the ones who rise to leadership positions.
18. Practice "Disagree and Commit"
Healthy teams have conflict. The best ideas emerge from rigorous debate and diverse viewpoints. However, once a decision is made, it’s crucial that everyone gets behind it, even those who initially disagreed. This is the "Disagree and Commit" principle, famously used at Intel and Amazon.
Encourage your team to voice their concerns and argue their points passionately during the decision-making process. But once a path is chosen, everyone must commit to executing it with 100% effort. This prevents passive-aggressive behavior, unifies the team, and allows you to move forward with speed and conviction.
Your Culture is Your Legacy
Building a lasting company culture is not an accident. It's the result of deliberate, consistent, and disciplined habits practiced every single day, starting from day one. These 18 habits are not a checklist to be completed; they are a set of behaviors to be lived. They are the foundational code that will determine whether your company thrives for a decade or flames out in a year.
Don't wait until you're a team of 50 to start thinking about this. The culture you have tomorrow is being built by the actions you and your founding team take today.
What's the one habit from this list you can implement with your team this week? Share your commitment in the comments below—let's build companies that last, together.
About the Author
Goh Ling Yong is a content creator and digital strategist sharing insights across various topics. Connect and follow for more content:
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